Deciding upon a backupsolution, around 4tb

So I'm looking for a new backup solution. At the moment I have a laptop with 250gb, and my girlfriend with around the same. She has a 500gb external HDD, and I have 3x 1tb external drives
1 drive as a regular external drive
Another drive as backup for that drive
Another drive as backup for everything else.

However, I need more storage – so I'm thinking of upgrading to a 2tb HDD.

Now, I'm trying to work out my backup options. I could use the 2tb as a backup drive, use my 2x 1gb drives as normal externals, and the 3rd 1tb drive to back up the laptops + other hard drive, however my gf will be getting a netbook soon, and we may then be out of backup space.

So, perhaps I need 4tb to back up to (my 2tb of external storage, her 500gb of external storage....actually, she may take my 1tb instead, so say 3tb between us, plus about 500gb from laptop hard drives.....). So, what would be the best solution? I can pick up a 2tb WD drive from officeworks for $139, so 2 of those would be $280.

Are there any cheaper or better options (at a low price)? I just seem to be accumulating hard drives at the moment, which is getting kind of annoying...

I've seen, for instance, this – http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=177_287&products_id=14363(preview) – at PC case gear (just a 2HDD enclosure) for $99, so that plus 2.2tb hard drives will come to about $280 (plus postage, of course), though really I'm just saving one power point, so not sure if it's worth the extra expense.

I thought about some sort of network attached storage, but I'm not sure how fast that is (though it may be simpler for on-the-fly backups), or how cheap...

I'm just thinking that, with NAS, I may be able to 'constantly backup', which would be useful for my partner who will be doing her Masters this year.

This is about the cheapest I can find – http://www.austin.net.au/ProductLis...ductCode/HD-CASACRHD5176/Default.aspx(preview)

 

Depending how much time you want to spend and how technically savvy you are you could get a cheap case + PSU and a nano/atom ITX motherboard with 4+ sata connectors. Then just fill the case with 4x 2TB drives and install something like FreeNAS.

Probably would be around $500-$550, but you'd have roughly 6TB usable if you went the raidz route with redundancy to loose one drive.

 

That's getting to a bit of overkill, I think. If I go NAS, I'd probably look for something with 4 bays (futureproof against future data expansion), see if there's anything matching that under $200

 

That's a fair bit of data to be backing up regularly.
I'd be working out if I needed to backup all my linux / unix ISOs

And be more worried about photo's & documents.
Then I would be making sure the backups of those were as automated as possible that only report on a failure. (No point telling you via email the backups worked, you will be trained to ignore those emails pretty quickly. So just make it email you when it fails).

And any financial like documents + important photos get backed up online too with a paid backup service.

 

Docs and photos are definitely the most important, but even all the other stuff (music, movies) would be frustrating to lose.

All of my data will be on 1tb hard drives, so it's easy to set one of those to back up overnight.

I guess NAS would allow things to operate a little more automatically, rather than having to bother to plug the HDD in and run the backup.

Hmm, decisions, decisions....

 

You can build an ITX based solution for cheaper than a decent NAS but either way it might be overkill for your needs.

I have a 4x2tb system that I built that runs opensolaris and gives me 6tb of usable space. I'm sure there are fancy things I could be doing with it but I just mount it as a shared drive on each of my computers and run a robocopy backup script. For me it was worth setting up because it's a solution that you don't need to worry about and requires zero maintenance.

I also use MozyHome as my cloud based storage, which is more for data protection incase our place gets burnt down.

 

I was in a similar situation.

I recently went down the path of a NAS (ReadyNAS NV+) with 4 x 2TB drives and it cost me around $750 all up with 5.5-6tb of usable storage. You could just go down the path of 3 and have around 4tb of usable space but best to look at future storage requirements also

I'm happy with the speeds, power consumption and cost so all is good!

I've setup robocopy for both my computer and my wifes Laptop. Works very well.

 

Just occurred to me that we only have wireless G at home - it just took me 7 1/2 minutes to transfer a 330mb file from one laptop to another.

Thus, it seems that backing up over the network would be impractically slow, so there's probably no point going for NAS, I'm thinking

 

I have the server connected at 100mbps with my PC, the laptop and the mediaPC all connected over 54g. Can stream movies from the server fine and I just schedule backups for 5am.